It’s no secret that many Christians have lapsed from our ancient, masculine faith into the modern Church of Nice.
To defeat the Death Cult, the Church will have to tie on the head band, spit on her hands, and make some messes.
TTRPG enthusiast and fellow Catholic theologian Rick Stump once addressed the misperception among Dungeons & Dragons players that good is weak and stupid.
Many years ago I had been only DMing for months when a guy I knew invited me to sit in on a game he played. He said it had a ranger, a cleric, a magic-user and two thieves. I sat with him and rolled up a paladin on my first try. I was very eager to play and described how my character rode up to the small country home they used as a base and dismounted, and introduced myself as So and So the paladin.
At that point the entire party attacked my character and killed him in a single round.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Paladin,” said one of the players, “We hate paladins. Can’t stand that lawful good bull.”
“But I thought you were a ranger?” I said.
“I am! But we’re all chaotic neutral – the DM let’s rangers be neutral.” he replied.
The DM felt that killing a good person for no reason was at worst a chaotic act, which surprised me even more until, sitting in (I had a spare character because that is the way I roll) I watched this party ofchaotic neutral players loot and pillage a hamlet because one of them only needed 80 experience points to level up. When they were done they even burned the farms and barns. When I asked what they thought would happen to the 60-80 innocent men, women, and children whom they had just left foodless, penniless, homeless, and without any livestock, tools, or weapons since Winter was less than a month away they replied ‘who cares? Just NPCs, man’. When I asked them why they never played or liked good characters they were near universal in saying, ‘Good is stupid and weak’.
I was once sitting in with a party, just observing, as the DM ran an NPC paladin who was guiding them. The party was neutral but on a mission from the Bishop and the paladin was the only guy that knew the way. The DM rolled an encounter and boom! red dragon attacks the party. After the first round I quietly asked the DM,
“Did you forget the paladin? He’s just sitting there.”
“What? He would never help neutral people!”
The paladin sat there on his horse, sword in its sheath and lance rested doing nothing until the dragon breathed fire, killing half the party as well as the paladin and his warhorse. The party, with no guide and too weak from the encounter anyway, turned back. When I asked the DM why he did things that way he said (as close to a direct quote as I can get after the years),
“Have you read the books? No paladin would ever help a neutral person, ever!”
“But his inaction let an evil creature triumph! That wasn’t about helping neutral people, that was about destroying evil!”
“The lawful part means he has to do that even if it is stupid.”
Note that the evil-masquerading-as-neutral players and DMs had their concept of good formed by post-1980 fantasy books.
As for Rick…
I had been running my Seaward campaign for 6 years before I read The Hobbit and for 8 before I read The Lord of the Rings. I had spent my early years reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Andre Norton, Le Morte D’Arthur, and (especially) the stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers. Heck, I read Vance’s Lyonesse before I read The Fellowship of the Ring.
The great thing about the books that I read first and most, from the Twelve Peers to the Return of the King, was that they all give a very clear idea of what is meant by good and evil, especially within the milieu of fantasy, be it literature or tabletop role playing.
The Twelve Peers, John Carter, Allan Quatermaine all shared a few traits – they were brave, they were honest, the protected the weak, and they were decisive. They also laughed, had close friends, drank, and fought. But they also were champions of the weak, loyal friends, fierce enemies, and able to judge others by their words and deeds rather than being bigoted (John Carter not only has friends of all of the races of Mars he forges close ties between them for the first time in millenia; Allan Quatermaine admires and supports Umbopa/Ignosi long before he learns he is a king; if a man is a good fighter and a Catholic his past is his past to the paladins.
Yet again, we see the sharp difference in quality and foundational morality between post-1980 fiction and the classic pulps.
As for good being stupid and weak, ask the golden calf worshipers about Moses. Ask the priests of Baal about Elijah. Ask the heresiarch Arius about St. Nicholas and the traitorous French nobles about St. Joan of Arc.
Not only is goodness the truth, it is being. Evil is nothing more than a lacking in the good with no positive existence of its own.
Sickness is the absence of health. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Sin is a lack of charity.
This parasitic relationship means that evil is not only weaker than the good, evil is wholly dependent on it.
In a similar sense, defeat is the lack of victory.
Evil can only win if good men cooperate with it through act or omission.
Let’s act accordingly.
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Killing the paladin immediately…that hit kinda hard, and really says something about modern popular culture.
But I have a theory.
Keep in mind what “good” is, according to modern culture: it’s following arbitrary rules and accepting mistreatment, even in the face of open violence. If you try to fight back against someone who is attacking you, the law will punish *you.* Doing the right thing is no protection from unfair punishments, and what was the “right thing”, or at least okay, at one time becomes black-hearted heresy the next time, and you must apologize for ever having disobeyed the self-appointed authorities.
In other words, “good people” are suckers, and a “paladin” is just a schoolmarm with a sword, a contemptible creature who *enforces* arbitrary and stupid rules.
By contrast, bad guys get to have all the fun. They don’t have to follow all those little rules that enslave “good” people to authorities who hate them anyway. They don’t have to accept abuse, and get to turn the tables on their abusers. Note that the players called the farmers they killed ‘just NPCs’ and didn’t care that livelihoods and lives were destroyed. They have nothing but contempt for weak, stupid rule-followers.
Also note that the players were not rebelling against unjust authority, doing good in defiance of the king’s law. Instead, they acted like rampaging barbarians seizing and destroying whatever they pleased. Under materialism, “might makes right” is the whole of the law, so no higher principle exists to hold the king and his law against. The point isn’t that the rightful authority is unjust, it’s that it’s “good” — that is, stupid and weak, and the players are more powerful than the stupid and weak losers who follow said authority. If the king’s men come at the player characters for their villainy, it’s a simple matter of cutting the king’s men down and proving who is the mightier.
Until reading this post, I hadn’t realized how insidious this messaging is.
Part of it is enforced passivity at schools. My peers fell for the “good is weak” meme because of how punishment was dealt out for “fighting.” My non-captured private Christian school principal (man, btw) sent me back to class while the guy who started the fight had the book thrown at him. The later public school principal (woman) told me that I was equally guilty for fighting and suspended me. When I asked what I was supposed to do, she told me “self-defense” was, basically, curling up in a ball and waiting for a teacher to break it up (which they never did).
Fortunately, I have a masculine dad who reinforced *actual* good behavior.
It Takes Two To Make A Fight. And Leave Action to the Authorities (though odds are action isn’t their job, either.) Absolutely pernicious.
This is a topic I may come to harp on if I am not careful, but it was once, by English and American legal tradition, the duty of any able-bodied man to intervene in a crime in progress. Now, the people with a direct interest or with the implication that intervening is a part of their job description are often specifically prohibited from doing so.
Goodness is docility. Teacher told you so, to get fewer headaches, forgetting she was supposed to be instilling virtues over having an easier workday. And the consequences are everywhere.
Remember that even characters like Dirty Harry were considered “antiheroes” by this crowd when . . . he isn’t one in the slightest. When your perspective is that bent and skewed about what good and evil are, well, it’s no wonder things have turned out to be as messy as they are in Current Year.
When you realize the source for much of this are Gen X kids who have a chip on their shoulder, a lot of it comes into focus.
I’m also reminded of the sword and sorcery boom in the ’70s celebrated because of “antiheroes” and wanton sex and destruction, and the reframing of Conan as being “a bit of a dick with a sword” who was only out for himself and his appetites.
Even now I’ll read some of these stories starring “antiheroes” and walk away a bit surprised that, outside of the 1970s’ obsession with explicit sexual intercourse, there isn’t much in the way of degenerate behavior. Killing a villain and stopping him from destroying others is not anti-hero behavior. Such a mentality has even crossed over into mainstream entertainment and comic books–just look at how they see Batman’s modern no-kill rule which makes no sense as a vigilante.
I will posit a guess that a lot of these misconceptions come out of the morally retarded 1970s and were allowed to fester because no one told Gen X kids they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Naturally, because they were wrong, their rules and systems have only decayed and fallen apart more and more as time has gone on.
The Nice Heresy has been infecting American churches since at least my childhood, and it’s tearing apart theology. What’s been funny is that the two most resistant types of churches are at opposite ends if the spectrum: Old churches resistant to change (e.g. Catholic) and decentralized churches where congregations are free to leave if leadership goes all heretical (e.g.Church of God and offshoots), though not from lack of trying.
As to TTRPG stuff, this is also the result of the video gaming of RPGs, where you can just do that. When I DM, even if I don’t force alignment changes, a party that burns a village for xp will soon find itself on the business end of an army mustered by that village’s lord. Even Spoony, a Pop Cultist of the highest circle, pointed out that good characters can get help from the authorities and are more likely to be trusted by people familiar with their reputation. They will naturally have more safe havens and markets to interact with.
Of course, the “Good is dumb” edgelords are now the ones feeding the Game of Thrones fandom, what little of it is left after everybody figured out the only ending that matches the story’s philosophy is the White Walkers winning.
I’m embarrassed how obsessed I was with that series. Looking back on it, I find the series to be incredibly dull after Ned died. GRRM realized that he wrote himself into a corner after killing off the other two lawfully good characters in Robb and Jon Snow and he gave up on the series.
Don’t be. Its objective quality is quite good. The characters are gripping, well written, and act like real people. GRRM just has a tragic flaw that prevents it from being able to fulfill the promises it made to viewers/readers, and that’s nihilism.
That’s the attitude that lead to the Gen X obsession with anti-heroes from the ’80s underground, up through the extreme ’90s, and into the nihilistic 2000s. The further we’ve gone along since then, the more we’ve lost what heroism is. It’s even to the point where when they try to make a good hero they can’t help but make a Mary Sue, simply because they’ve lost that link.
This mentality has infected Japanese media as well. Kengan Ashura, despite an incredibly bad ass anime with nothing but fighters as main characters portrays a Punisher rip off as mentally unstable. I forgot the characters name, but he is a SWAT officer turned vigilante who hunts criminals for justice. Despite all of the criminals shown to be killed by him flat out deserved it. The show is written to try and make one sympathetic to one thief who the Punisher parody “saves” (kills after) from Yakuza, but let’s slip he was a career criminal and druggie involved in a hit and run that nearly killed a family. The show has to show him being tortured who just kills for random and a complete over the top strawman of a vigilante to make the character seem unlikeable, and from what I read on TV Tropes the manga continues that mentality. Evil cannot understand good.
Another awesome anime is Goblin Slayer, in which the goblins are shown at their most evil. But for some reason parts of the fan base (you can guess which ones) think the Goblin Slayer is deranged for killing all of the goblins despite them being shown to all rapist, torturers and genocidal. The Goblin Slayer is never shown to be wrong, but even the creator has stated he is deranged despite always helping others and hunting down minions of the demon lord who would kill everyone and everything if he could. Oh, and he is also a Punisher (and Batman) homage. The modern West, and that includes Japan, take too much of Nietzsche’s ” he who fights monsters” crap seriously. Liberalism is not good, cannot defend that which is good, and produces a mind set incapable of being good.
I actually have taken to calling the wanton empathy-free consequence-free slaughtering of NPC’s as Skyrim syndrome, the reason being that that’s where I first saw the action. I long since have quit bothering looking into the majority of RPG communities and just shared experiences with direct friends.
Honestly the only electrical RPG I have played that had a fully responsive world was Kenshi, which taught me hard and fast that this game doesn’t start you as anyone special. If you pick a fight with NPC’s in The Hub, they mulch you and throw you out of the town, where a passing group of nomads will pass you, ignore you, and not raise a finger when the Slavers drag you off in chains to the lands of the The United Cities to sell you off, only to get ambushed by five or six Beak Things (yes, that’s the official name, they haunt my nightmares.) who then eat you and your captors alive.
Alternatively, treat the NPC’s with respect, and most will leave you alone. if you can set up a base with a squad of other characters and hold it, there’s a chance you can either be a passive farmer hold or, if your feeling *really* lucky, you can try to take on the local bandits or cannibal Hivers, or cannibal Humans, or even throw down the tyrants of the Holy Nation or the United Cities with the Shek and Hivers as your allies. The game just sets you in a world, with nothing to your name and says. “Alright, your here, here are some guides, now go and die *a lot!*
Something I commented on a while ago, although without the specific illustrative examples:
https://youtu.be/8Q-H2WE-faU
I’ve moved away from the traditional 9-square alignment grid to the 5-point spectrum (first used in Holmes, later picked up by 4e) in the games I DM now. Lawful good, good, unaligned, evil, chaotic evil. And players can only be good or lawful good (unaligned in special cases). I think it reinforces to players what playing a heroic character is supposed to mean.
It also reminds me of the difference in how law and chaos are presented in Poul Anderson vs Moorcock. Anderson always associates Chaos with Evil (or negation of good) and implies that it will lose to Law/Good in the end. Unlike Moorcock’s midwit take that not only are both sides forever evenly matched, there’s no real difference between them. One more of those retarded influences from the 70s.
It gets worse in the 80s, when you start seeing the balance concept applied to Good and Evil explicitly. It pops up in all sorts of stuff, although the most explicit example I’m aware of is Dragonlance.
Game of Thrones didn’t help with matters by killing off Ned Stark for being too stupid. As a result, we’re left to root for bloodthirsty sociopaths.
When the showrunners took this problem to its logical conclusion with Dany in the penultimate episode, the fans revolted.
Why? The series never hid the ball about its disdain for lawfully good characters.
This problem is so deep it’s hard to know where to start and who to blame more: those who push this stuff, or those who swallow it whole? Or those who let it happen?
I don’t know where people keep getting these mass murderer players for their RPGs. Maybe I’m just very lucky to have avoided them. On the topic of Niceness, I’ll offer my perspective: yes, Good doesn’t mean being a doormat by any stretch, but I’m concerned about the possibility of overreacting in a harmful way. As someone with severe scrupulosity, maybe my position is unique, but I struggle greatly with a false image of God as a merciless tyrant setting snares and gotchas for the weak. I fear that a “Tough” priest might end up accidentally reinforcing those neuroses while thinking that he’s doing the right thing, or at least might cause my fragile emotional state to break down. I’ve seen where that road leads, and it’s not pretty. Best case, you end up with a miserable life that’s only endured rather than enjoyed. Worst case, you end up sinking into total despair. I was going to make the same comment on your post about young priests too, since there’s overlap there, but I feel like that’d be unnecessary.
From the title, I thought the article was going to be about a church in France.
On the topic of RPGs, I’m currently playing an interesting Wuxia JRPG called Wandering Sword. Whatever its flaws, the game seems to have very little in the way of moral ambiguity; the Righteous Sects are almost uniform in their moral perfection while the bad guys are so over the top that the biggest criminal group is called “Villain Valley”. It’s refreshing in a way, though the protagonist might be going a little bit too far, in that he’s such a flawless moral paragon that he doesn’t always feel like an actual real person with actual character traits outside of being Righteous.
One of my TTRPG bros is a big Wuxia fan. The genre is rife with fascinating concepts, including the hidden underworld containing heroes and villains alike. It’s your choice whether or not to enter, but once made, that decision can be difficult to revoke.
The complementary idea that the wuxia hero’s personal righteousness gives him the authority to mete out justice is another compelling theme that in many ways mirrors the gunslinger of the Wild West.
It also has no shame about religion either. You join a Taoist sect as part of the plot, and they make you swear an oath that roughly goes “Honour the Tao, for it is the Law of Nature, Honour the Scriptures, for they are your path to the truth, and honour your Shifu, for he is the one who helps you walk that path”. I admit to having a minor soft spot for Taoism, since an Eternal and Natural Moral Law is at the heart of it.
I’ve even seen wuxia movies with Christian sects.
Wandering Sword is great! Ine of my contenders for Game of the Year aling with Caves of Lore.
My only real reason for complaint is that I’d like it to be a little more open world. Even if they don’t want to let you join an evil sect or whatever, you could surely join one of the other Righteous Sects like the Beggars Sect or the Shaolin Temple.